


Vows in Wine

by billspilledquill



Category: If We Were Villains - M.L. Rio
Genre: Angst, Implied Self-Harm, M/M, Post-Canon, The Talk but nothing gets solved, they speak exclusively in Shakespeare quotes I'm tired of it myself
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-29
Updated: 2019-03-29
Packaged: 2019-12-26 09:46:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18280649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/billspilledquill/pseuds/billspilledquill
Summary: James kisses him by the same way he has tried to die. He pretends to be worthless.





	Vows in Wine

**Author's Note:**

> It was not supposed to be sad, I'm sorry.  
> I miss this book a lot, though.

 

James kisses him by the same way he has tried to die. He pretends to be worthless.

It’s hardly pretention, he reminds himself, James is proud to be worthless, to fade away as he reminds them all that he is there, that he will never, ever truly go. Oliver knows how to feel worthless, but he has never known how to take pride in it, how to dwell in it like honey, sweet, unstinged.

And there’s the rub: James likes to remind him that he is worthless. In order to do that, he kisses him the same during their King Lear production. And Oliver clings to it like James clinged to it at that final show, as he was about to fall over the precipice, a sword in his chest.

They're alike, he thinks. In the small, dimming light, James’ lashes flutter like Queen Tamora did when she was disguised as Revenge, her eyes, even closed, were as tempting as the demon. Maybe Richard was riding along with them, after all, as the three horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Oliver, on the other hand, does not have enough will to pretend to be Titus.

James is not Meredith, and she not him. But something about the hard, stifed back that he is holding onto remembers him that Meredith had felt like this, once, despite her soft thighs and curves, (she probably felt it too); hardening beneath his touch like water to ice, lava to rock.

It’s not difficult to guess who’s the problem here.

“ _Stars_ ,” James whispers against his skin, “ _hide your fires._ ”

The night. The beach. Himself. Oliver doesn't know.

And he looks at him underneath his thick, curved lashes. There could be a war that he can't see. Oliver almost agreed with Shakespeare again, submitting to poetry, about life and everything else: Let not light see my black and deep desires.

Macbeth and Lady Macbeth did not die of guilt, he and James have reached that conclusion in their third year at a late night with no stars in the horizon. They died by the fear of being found out. It's that nagging, consuming fire that never stops oiling their soul, until they become shallow, vain, and unable of warmth.

James sought him out. It can only be explained thus. James had found him, and not the other way around. The letter, the car, the beach, everything was James' idea. It was James borrowing words from the dead to pretend to be dead, it was James telling him to come here, to welcome back the dead like some great Leander or loving Orpheus. All was James, and all is James, still, with his eyes opening wide, as boundless as the sea.

James, James, James. The only word that he borrowed more than Shakespeare's. _James_ , at the end, does not belong to him. James is a name that seems to have an expiration date.

James does not kiss him like there's many time left. Time to time again he wonders: is he real? Shakespeare is real the same way that James is real, so Oliver wonders something else, then.

" _That dread of something_ ," Oliver answers, of course, of course less steadier than the other man. His voice trembles and quivers, unlike an actor, but like Hamlet, " _the undiscovered country._ "

" _Makes us fly to others that we know not of,_ " James says sharply, yet he takes a step back.

He and James used to discuss about the nunnery scene. How Hamlet was trying to warn rather than to abuse. James would argue, and Oliver would retort halfheartedly like self-conscious people do, while Richard eyes them with the stare that he knows all too well. It was easier then, he would like to say, but lying does not seem to work, after ten years on the field.

Oliver walks to him, to James who's fading again, a frantic heartbeat and quickened breath. James shakes his head, mouth open a little too wide.

" _I loved you not_ ," he says breathlessly, way too quickly. " _Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?_ "

There must be tears in James' eyes. That's why he can't see him through the haze.

" _I was the more deceived, then._ "

James' nostrils flare up, and he clutches his hair, shaking his head all the more violently. " _Notice, I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offenses at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in._ "

James' anger is not unfounded, and there is a bitter reminiscence to Hamlet and Ophelia that is unique to them. To our story. To our lives. He can't help but walk closer, smiling as he says, " _We are arrant knaves, all. Believe none of us._ "

" _It hath made me mad,_ " James confesses quietly.

" _All but one_ ," Oliver answers, his anger like fog in the mist, " _all but one, shall live._ "

James' shoulders slack when he touches them. James hesitates before speaking, and he never hesitates when reciting a line, " _The rest shall keep as they are._ "

It was a question, Oliver knows it. James asks questions by licking his lips, by holding his head high. A proud scholar, with no answers that might scare him.

There is a pause, then, " _The rest shall keep as they are._ "

None of them went to the nunnery. Instead, James crumbles to the beach sand, the night shading it a white, pale color of gold. Oliver lets the anger directed at James and himself shown through another kiss. Salt, blood, and reminders.

Oliver would choke if he speaks, so he doesn't. It was James ( _it's always James)_ , that spoke after minutes of silence that felt like another ten years all over again.

" _I pray you_ ," he says, his gesture as sincere as prayers do, " _do not fall in love with me, for I am falser than vows made in wine."_

Oliver remembers their first year, when he didn't know him like he did now and when half of the world was in love with him, that James, young Romeo, would sing this line like a mantra. The second year, James admitted to him with some terribly honest voice that it was true. That he did not lie like Rosalind, that he is truly Ganymede, and not fit for love.

He must have known, then, that James could never be Shakespeare's hero.

" _The whippers are in love too_ ," Oliver says.

James stands, dusts the sand off his knees. There's an exasperated, panicked tone to the line. Scant of emotions, he jumps from one play to another: " _Then how does he love me?_ "

James asked it because he knows that Oliver remembers it. He would pretend after that it was only a script. To be this proud and this afraid, it must be trying. 

Some script resurfaces in his mind, the part of him that believes that Shakespeare had killed Richard answers: " _With adoration,_ " he breathes out. " _With fertile tears, with-_ "

He stops, and that part that believes, like Filippa, that they were all fucked up before Macbeth can't remember the rest. James closes his eyes, his naked feet in the sand, his hands on his waist. The touch barely felt like one, as everything James is.

" _With groans that thunder loved with sighs of fire_ ," he completes in a sigh. For a moment, Oliver thought that he was disappointed. He looks over, but James has his eyes closed again, his head bowed down for the first time. Oliver thought about prayers, and gods that don't deserve to be.

James does not ask why does he love him. Whether it's because he thinks that Oliver is a fool in love without reason, or that he is not worthy of it, James has never asked why. Not once he had inquired their relationship, and not once, even when Richard was calling them out about how their knees touched and how their eyes wander to each other with every chance of distraction. Never has he asked why, and it felt like a dirty trick to ask it.

So they hide inside Shakespeare plays, and pretend to be some kind of tragic lesson for the world. James breathes slowly, as if asleep by the sound of familiar verses and chants. 

James is so cold. He can feel the scars on his arm with his fingers, and for a long moment, he knows that James can be dead. That like all ghosts and miracles, he came back from the undiscovered.

But he isn't, now, with his cold, bare shoulders and wet hair; and that is choice enough.

Oliver is no poet. So he wants to tell him about Wren, about Alexander, about how their only way out was through. How no one, if ever, wants to talk about him.

Oliver had ran here, where the sun meets the sea. James shadows are getting longer. It's the moonlight.

For someone who loves other people's words so much, Oliver feels his lackluster. Who are they to speak of love in their own terms? To finish this with the final lines of All's Well is what Oliver intended. He wants to go back to his room, reads the letter all over again.

(Saying, with his own words, that he loves him.)

" _For god's sake,_ " James, as always, makes his lines warlike, “ _For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground, and tell sad stories of the death of kings."_

" _Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs?_ " Oliver laughs despite himself. He sits with him on the wet sands. His sandals forgotten; his toes tickling.

James' eyes are pretty. They have never stopped being pretty. " _Ay, for you have but mistook me all this while: I live with bread like you, feel want, taste grief, need friends; subjected thus, how can you say to me, I am a King?_ "

So Oliver leans toward him. And he tells him, why Shakespeare is not enough. How he _comes at the last, and with a little pin, bores through his castle wall, and farewell King!_

James stays still, closes his eyes, and pretends, as he always does, to be the worthless king in a captured city; hoping to wash off, as Macbeth's wife did, stains that did not exist.

" _He does me double wrong_ ," he hears James whispering, " _that wounds me with the flattering of his tongue._ " And for the first time, Oliver pretends he did not hear it, and leans in some more.

Such is the breath of kings. 

 


End file.
